As is known, services supported by next generation user terminal equipments, such as personal digital assistants, mobile phone, smart phones or laptops connected to wireless local area networks (WLANs), allow users to access high value-added contents in the network and also to exchange sensitive information in commercial transactions and in many other applications now accessible to mobile users.
A terminal equipment is generally provided with a removable integrated circuit card which manages security, communication features and transactions, and, optionally, with a removable memory card with a large memory size, such as a multimedia card, a secure Digital™ input/output card, a memory Stick™ card etc., which allows the user to store music, videos, games and personal data.
Presently, a terminal equipment controls the integrated circuit card and the memory card through separate physical and logical channels, and acts on these peripherals as a master in order to perform services which exploit their features separately, i.e. the terminal equipment keeps always the control of the communication and does not permit the direct communication between these peripherals.
An example of such a terminal equipment can be a mobile phone which uses a subscriber identity module (SIM) card in order to access the GSM mobile communication network, and a multimedia card to store music, videos, and games. The mobile phone exchanges data with the SIM card through a standard interface defined in the 3GPP TS 51.011 and can receive commands from the SIM card thanks to a proactive interface defined in the 3GPP TS 51.014. This standard describes the physical and the logical channels between the mobile phone and the SIM card, but does not provide any link with the multimedia card; the latter is in fact accessible only by the application which runs on the mobile phone and there isn't no way for the SIM card to reach it.
Some examples of a terminal equipment which uses a number of cards to exploit their features separately are disclosed in EP-A-1 278 154, U.S. Pat. No. 6,012,634, U.S. Pat. No. 6,216,015, US 2002/016500, and WO 02/067611.
In particular, EP-A-1 278 154 discloses a Multifunction integrated circuit card having the form factor of a multimedia card or a secure Digital™ card and including a card substrate provided with terminals arranged in two rows in a zigzag fashion, and a memory card and a SIM card mounted on the card substrate and exclusively connected to predetermined terminals. The memory card and the SIM card are separately provided with areas for storing secrete codes for security, so that the multifunction integrated circuit card is capable of implementing multifunction facilities different in security level.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,012,634 discloses a smart card which can communicate with both a smart-card-compatible device and a memory-card-compatible device. The smart card includes a processor which performs smartcard functions and a memory for use with a memory card device connection which allows operation of the memory-card-compatible device. Cellular telephones facilitate the use of two types of cards therein.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,216,015 discloses a wireless subscriber unit which includes a memory manager capable of communicating with a plurality of smart cards. The memory manager is programmed to allocate a memory segment to each smart card when it is operatively connected to an interface of the wireless subscriber unit. The memory manager communicates with the smart card to update data stored in the memory segment.
US 2002/0165008 discloses a mobile phone wherein private data stored in its internal memory are erased when the SIM card is pulled out. Before being erased, the private data are encrypted and transferred to and stored into an external memory. The encrypted private data stored into the external memory can be reused when the SIM card is used in another mobile telephone.
WO 02/067611 discloses a method for administrating a SIM card inserted in a main smart card reader of a mobile phone of the type including a second smart card reader, using an additional administrator smart card temporarily inserted in this second smart card reader. The administrator smart card includes at least one specific loader applet and one or more files corresponding to the applets which can be loaded in the SIM card under the control of the loader. The administrator card complies with the SIM toolkit standard. The method can also be used to carry out the deletion, modification and various operations on data or applets present in the SIM card: display, determination of the memory space, etc.
The fact that terminal equipments control the integrated circuit card and the memory card through separate physical and logical channel is a great bar to the development of new services based on scenarios where the service provider is the owner of both the integrated circuit card and the memory card, and the commercial success of which services mainly depends on their independence from the processing capabilities of the terminal equipments.